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THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 



THE GREAT 
EXPECTANCY 

BY 

Margaret Prescott Montague 

AUTHOR OF 

"HOME TO hem's MTJWER," "OF WATER AND THE SPIRir," 

"TWENTY MINUTES OF REALITY," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

68i FIFTH AVENUE 






Copyright, 1918, 
BY E. p. BUTTON & COMPANY 

All Rights Reserved 



4!1G i 2 1918 



Printed in the United States of America 



©GLA501470 



^^v I 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

The Great Expectancy made its 
first public appearance in the columns 
of The Atlantic Monthly as one of a 
series of papers about the effect of the 
War on a secluded southern valley. 

The special message which it holds 
seemed to make its publication in 
some more permanent form desirable. 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 



THE 
GREAT EXPECTANCY 

BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE 

YESTERDAY we had our Sun- 
day-school picnic. We have one 
every year, and heretofore they have 
all floated down the tide of memory, 
hardly distinguishable one from an- 
other, in a medley of green trees, 
fried chicken, boys and girls, toddling 
babies, and old people. But this one 
was different. I shall always remem- 
ber it on account of old Aunt Livy. 
It so happens that three of our 
9 



lo THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

four volunteers come from different 
branches of the same family, and all 
are Aunt Livy's great nephews. They 
were at home for the picnic from near- 
by training-camps, very gay and self- 
conscious in their khaki, and were 
soon to leave us, first for larger train- 
ing-camps, and then for France. And 
while they strutted about and drilled 
the girls in their Red Cross costumes, 
Aunt Livy sat under the green trees 
and wept all alone, and everybody 
pretended not to notice. We did not 
want to see the tears, we wanted to 
think that war was just smart uni- 
forms, and pretty Red Cross girls, and 
picnics; and so, when Aunt Livy, in 
her bright purple dress and her hat 
with its black plume nodding gro- 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 1 1 

tesquely down over her eyes, said, 
'He's my little nephew,' and, 'Well, 
write ef you kin,' mopping her eyes 
and her trembling mouth with a big 
old hand, because she had lost her 
handkerchief, we all tried to slip 
away from her. But I shall always 
see that picnic, with the boys and girls 
laughing together, and the babies 
meandering here and there, and in the 
background, poor Aunt Livy, with no 
one to comfort her, sitting all alone 
under the sugar-maples, trembling 
and old, weeping over her little 
nephews. 

And now Christopher is dead, 
Christopher, who came all the way 
from England to our mountains seek- 
ing his fortune; Christopher, who 



12 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

shot ground-hogs, and rode, and fid- 
dled, and sang 'John PeeP so gayly, 
and who sat at our dinner-table just 
before he sailed for home and the 
great adventure. 

'Yes,' Maggie says, 'I kin see him 
now a settin' right here' — she indi- 
cates a special corner of the table, — 
'an' he says, "Yes, when the war's 
over I'll come back an' give a lecture 
here in the church and tell you about 
fighting in France and everything." ' 

O, Christopher! If you would 
come back now and tell us all about 
everything, how breathlessly we 
should listen! But I like to think 
how happy you were just before you 
went. Down here in the West Vir- 
ginia mountains, so far away from 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 13 

the great conflict, I suspect that you 
had known 'great thoughts of heart.' 
But once the decision was made, you 
won through to a great serenity and 
content; and one thinks of you only 
as young and gay and fortunate; for, 
in the old days, — such a short little 
time ago, — when we all made merry 
together, who ever thought that so 
many of you Englishmen were to be 
offered a place in the ranks of a great 
crusade, to have the glory of a very 
great enterprise'? 

And what of us who are left? 
Life has all at once become a very 
solemn and sacred thing. We cannot 
take it lightly any more, it is sancti- 
fied by the deaths of too many. It is 
a gift to us, something to be accepted 



14 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

gravely and reverently from dead 
hands, and to be lifted up to such 
high and shining levels, that the con- 
secrated gift may be the medium 
through which the Great Expectancy 
may find its way into the world for 
its fulfillment. 

Yes, war is here; it is staring at us 
through the boys' khaki, the girls' red 
crosses, and through old Aunt Livy's 
tears. But what next? What after 
the war? 

Well, as the life of our valley 
breaks through its own narrow isola- 
tion and goes forth into the activities 
of a wider world, so all those activi- 
ties are gathered up and enfolded in 
something else, something larger, 
something further on — and this some- 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 15 

thing seems to me to be what the 
Great Expectancy points to. 

When I look back over the years, 
and seek to reconstruct my own past, 
I see it most often against the back- 
ground of the Big Valley. I see my- 
self seeking, hoping, and dreaming, 
under its trees, on the tops of its hills, 
and in the green pie-comers of its 
rail-fences; and certainly, if hopes 
and fancies and aspirations ever do 
have a resurrection, then, at the Day 
of Judgment, most of mine will arise 
and take wing out of the woods and 
fields and hillsides of the Big Valley 
in which they have so long lain asleep. 

But the Great Expectancy, which 
was the chief among the dreams, is 
having a resurrection already — with- 



i6 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

out waiting for the Judgment Day, — 
unless indeed that day is now upon 
us; and if it is to be born again, it 
shall be here in the Big Valley where 
it was first conceived, and where it 
went beside me, so constantly, albeit 
so elusively, through all those early 
days. 

If I am doubtful of the good taste 
of the personal pronoun, I rejoice to 
think that there are other and bigger 
things in the world at present than 
good taste; life has surged up, and 
overflowed its dykes too far to be 
stagnated in the cockle-shells and sil- 
ver bells of the small proprieties. 
Moreover, what I seek to offer 
through the narrow medium of self 
is, I know, a flood tide that is pouring 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 17 

itself into the world through many 
another channel of personality, and 
mine will be only one among many. 

I came into the world with a Great 
Expectancy. Somewhere, sometime, 
something immense, something won- 
derful might happen while I was here. 
What the great event was to be, I did 
not know; I only knew a vague rest- 
lessness and waiting. Possibly I sus- 
pected that the existing order of 
things was not quite as permanent as 
older people appeared to think it. 
Amusingly enough, one of my earliest 
recollections is of myself trying to re- 
fute the gloomy statement of an older 
person that we all had to die, on the 
ground that the end of the world 
might come while some of us were 



i8 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

yet alive, in which case we should be 
translated to heaven without the for- 
mality of death. For this contention 
I believe I had biblical authority to 
offer. But I was not allowed to offer 
it; I was told instead that, if I said 
such a silly thing again, I should be 
sent to bed; which of course was no 
argument, but was, I suppose, all that 
could be expected from elders living 
in a finished world. 

My world, however, was not fin- 
ished; it had not really begun, and I 
was waiting from moment to moment 
for the curtain to go up. I opened 
many a door, thinking that each 
might be the magic one that would 
give on the great adventure. And 
they all disclosed delightful bits of 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 19 

life, but they all stopped just short of 
what I was seeking. Perhaps I should 
never have felt that there was any 
big unseen thing afoot in the world — 
any romance just there behind the 
curtain — if I had not lived so close 
to nature. Some say that they are of 
Paul and some of ApoUos, but I was, 
first of all, of the Big Valley, of its 
woods and its fields, its wide sky and 
its mountains. They lifted me out 
of the littleness of self, and what 
they first suggested, Paul and Apol- 
los, Wordsworth and Blake later on 
elaborated. There was always a cer- 
tain adventure in going into the 
woods alone. When I pushed through 
the undergrowth and emerged under 
the trees, as the bushes swung to be- 



20 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

hind me, intangible doors closed on 
the outer world and inner doors 
opened. If I could not exactly say 
with Wordsworth, — 

There was a time when meadow, grove and 

stream 
The earth and every common sight, 
To me did seem 
Apparelled in celestial light, — 

at least I constantly expected that I 
might see them thus. There was al- 
ways a chance that that something 
else that was there might drop its cur- 
tain of woods and grass and birds, 
and suddenly stand forth revealed. I 
hoped and feared that some day I 
might meet Pan. 

Later I pursued this will-o'-the- 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 21 

wisp of expectancy through many 
other things. That was after Nature, 
my first love, had begun somewhat to 
relax her hold, knowing full well, the 
wise old woman, that she had set her 
image and superscription upon my 
heart forever ; knowing that, no mat- 
ter how occupied the rest of me might 
be, there would always be a little sen- 
tinel of love deep within me, who 
could never see any of her merry chil- 
dren, bird, bee, or blossom, without 
answering with a gay and affectionate 
salute. 

But while Nature had awakened 
love and drawn me ever on a quest of 
wonder and reverence that was out- 
side of my own small self, the other 
things too often played on vanity 



22 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

with extravagant promises. Well, I 
never really believed them; for, when 
one grows up with mountains rather 
than molehills against which to meas- 
ure one's self, one's importance be- 
comes amusingly small. Indeed, 
'Why so hot, little man'?' But at 
last I grew weary of the chase, de- 
ciding that if there were any great ad- 
venture it was not in the mirage of 
the just beyond, but rather in a clear- 
ing of the inner vision by a passion- 
ate devotion to the least and simplest 
events of everyday life. In which re- 
flection I was no doubt nearer to 
clutching the hem of Truth's garment 
than I had been at any time since 
childhood, when Nature, through the 
medium of the Big Valley, sought so 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 23 

tenderly and so charmingly to open 
my eyes. 

So, like a spectator at the play, I 
had come early, and waited so long 
for the performance to begin, that I 
had almost dropped asleep in my 
chair, when suddenly, with a crash, 
the curtain flew up on a drama so 
amazing, so titanic, so overwhelming, 
that one's very breath was snatched 
away in horror. In the wink of an 
eye we beheld the old stable world 
that we knew go up in fire and smoke 
— vanish like the snows of yesteryear. 

'Just think,' commented a friend of 
mine, looking at two little girls of 
five and six, 'these children will not 
be able to remember what the world 
was like before the war.' No, that 



24 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

is past history now. Where are those 
old years of 1911, 1912, 1913'? They 
seem ages away across there in the 
sunshine of the past, with a black 
chasm yawning between us. Never 
did history leap so abruptly from one 
epoch to another. Some of us do not 
even yet realize the change. We 
think that when peace returns, the 
old world as we knew it will return 
with it. And in that hope we are 
still trying to pull the remnants of 
that old world up over our ears to 
shut out the tremendous footfalls of 
the oncoming new. We think to pla- 
cate the ravenous times with little 
sops of service, a little knitting, a 
little patriotism, a little Red Cross 
work, as if one sought to defend one's 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 25 

self with a knitting-needle against the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Like the man 
in the parable, we had built snug ma- 
terial barns, and thought ourselves 
safe, when suddenly God said, 'Thou 
fool, this night is thy soul required of 
thee.' 

Can Fate be moving toward such 
an overwhelming event, just there be- 
hind the curtain of human sight, and 
no one in the world have any presci- 
ence of it? Did not the coming 
events cast their shadows before in all 
the wild restlessness of the first years 
of the century ? And did not some of 
us perhaps invite ourselves into life 
for this very period? Since time im- 
memorial there has been the belief 
that the spirit, before it enters the 



26 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

world, pulling the dark veil of time 
and matter over the eyes, has chosen 
its entry with a foreknowledge of 
what that period in life is to hold. 
What if some of us came into the 
world for the very sake of these tre- 
mendous times'? Can this be true? 
Who knows ? Not I, at least. I know 
only that, if it were true, when we got 
back to the other side, and stood at 
the crossroads of eternity, where we 
could look both forward and back, 
we should be deeply humiliated if, 
when the great events which we had 
sent our spirits forth to meet had ar- 
rived, they had so overwhelmed us 
that we went down into despair be- 
fore them, instead of meeting them 
with courage and high hearts, and 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 27 

weaving out of them some great re- 
demption. 

I would not force the idea either 
that the Great Expectancy which in- 
vited me through all the early years 
— as it doubtless invites most young 
people — was any veiled prophecy of 
the coming of a world-war. But one 
begins now to hope that that expect- 
ancy, which was no doubt the spirit 
groping through the dark, may yet 
out of all this world-agony come to 
a fuller realization. Shall nothing 
spiritual be born for the world out 
of all this grief? Shall old Aunt 
Livy weep all alone for her little 
nephews, in vain ; and Europe be cru- 
cified for no resurrection *? 

We have been like bewildered mar- 



28 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

iners swept by a dark tidal wave out 
of all our bearings, and, like the sail- 
ors of Columbus, we too at times have 
been mutinous with fear. 

They sailed and sailed as winds might 

blow, 
Until at last the blanched mate said: 
'Why, now not even God would know, 
Should I and all my men fall dead. 
These very winds forget their way. 
For God from these dead seas is gone. 
Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and 

say — ' 
He said: 'Sail on I sail on! and on!' 

And well, indeed, has it been for 
any of us who could hear a brave 
voice crying through the dark, 'Sail 
on, and on,' for now at length that 
voice begins to be justified. In 1914, 
the old world, as we knew it, sud- 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 29 

denly became without form and void 
and darkness was upon the face 
of the deep ; but now we begin to be- 
lieve that all the time the spirit of 
God was moving upon the face of the 
waters, and that presently He shall 
say, 'Let there be light/ 

The first act of the great drama 
was war and blood and destruction, 
and the second act was the same, 
more agony, more grief, terror, and 
destruction; but now there begins to 
be a great hope flaring through the 
darkness in many different quarters, 
and the voices of watchmen set 
upon towers begin to cry the glim- 
mer of daybreak. Perhaps the world 
sailing a dark track has all along 
been headed toward a great con- 



30 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

summation — 'Time's burst of dawn.' 

One holds no brief for war. This 
new thing was knocking at the doors 
of the world before 1914, and no one 
can say whether the war has hastened 
or retarded its entry; but perhaps it 
was inevitable that the old world of 
the materialist, topheavy with its 
overweening pride, should, like the 
devil-possessed swine of the Scrip- 
tures, rush violently down a steep 
place to its own destruction, and in 
the throes of its titanic suicide pull 
the rest of the world temporarily 
down with it. Moreover, when man 
is well and prosperous and full of 
himself, there seems to be little room 
for God; but when his prosperous 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 31 

world comes suddenly to an end, it 
leaves within him a vacuum of de- 
spair, into which the Spirit may pour 
itself. Perhaps also we hold too 
cheaply beliefs for which we are never 
called upon to die. The early Chris- 
tians did not take their faith lightly 
— they knew that at any moment 
they might have to offer their lives 
for it, and a thing that one dies for 
is a precious thing. We had forgot- 
ten that we could die for ideals, and 
when enough have fought and bled, 
those who are left may accept from 
their hands, with a stricken reverence, 
the hyssop of Eternal Truth, seeing 
how very deep it has been dipped in 
the sacrificial blood. 

Some look for a furtherance of de- 



32 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

mocracy out of this great conflict, 
and some for a brotherhood among 
the nations ; but others again look for 
something more — a fuller incarnation 
of the Spirit. I could quote many 
passages from late books and from 
magazine articles giving voice to this 
expectancy, but I will take instead the 
words of a blacksmith — not, it is true, 
of the Big Valley, but of this state, at 
least. 

'Yes,' he said, 'there's something 
new comin' — you can sorter feel it in 
the air.' 

The first sight is the difficult sight. 
When one goes into the spring woods 
to look for hepaticas, at first the 
woods are gray and dead. At last 
the eye lights upon a single clump of 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 33 

blossoms, and then, the sight being 
cleared, as it were, by this one cluster, 
suddenly one perceives that the woods 
are full of bloom. The eye must be 
attuned to hepaticas; so also the in- 
ner vision needs its adjustment as 
well. But catch one glimpse of this 
great expectancy, and suddenly one 
realizes that it is bursting forth in 
every direction. It is the young peo- 
ple who have the quick, the fresh eye ; 
their sight has not been too long ac- 
customed to the old things. And it 
is natural that they should be the 
first to offer a response to the oncom- 
ing of the Spirit. They have not been 
blind to the terror and awfulness of 
the time, they have seen the dark- 



34 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

ness of the tower, they have dared the 
worst, — 

In a sheet of flame 
I saw them and I know them all, and yet 
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 
And blew, 'Childe Roland to the dark 
tower came.' 

They are the children of the new 
generation, they are seeing something 
that their elders cannot always 
glimpse. 

'They have rediscovered the secret 
of the Ages of Enthusiasm,' says 
Maurice Barres. *By this token they 
are more complete natures than we, 
and come nearer to fulfilling the type 
of man made perfect.' And earlier in 
the same essay, he says, In these 
young men is taking place a resurrec- 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 35 

tion of our most glorious days. Some 
great thing is about to come into be- 
ing.' And again, 'Have you noticed 
that they speak constantly of God — 
that they pray?' 

*Some great thing is about to come 
into being.' 

'There's something new comin' — 
you kin sorter feel it in the air.' 

Blacksmiths in West Virginia, and 
Member of the French Academy echo 
each other. All over the world there 
is this feeling, this stir of expect- 
ancy, — 

Waiting to see some wonder momently 
Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the 
sky. 

Yet they are careful not to formu- 



36 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

late the hope beyond expectancy. 
Remembering Christ's admonition 
against the pouring of new wine into 
old bottles, they await the outpour- 
ing of this new wine, not anticipat- 
ing it, or insisting that it shall go into 
any old inflexible bottle of the past, 
but offering to it instead the humble 
and passionate receptacle of a broken 
and a contrite heart. 

The herald of the times displays a 
black scroll, but it is shot through 
with a transcendent gleam, a hope 
that cries to humanity for a great 
service, a great faith, and a great sur- 
render. Shall not this be our gift: 
that we in America oifer to all the 
gallant young men who have died for 
the cause of righteousness, a solemn 



THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 37 

consecration and dedication of our 
hopes to the Great Expectancy *? 
And bringing what treasures of gold 
and frankincense and myrrh our souls 
possess, pay a passionate tribute to 
their heroic memories in a high- 
hearted devotion to the blazing hope 
of the hour. 

If we can make answer in some 
such way, then indeed may we have 
confidence that none of old Aunt 
Livy's tears have been wasted, that 
none of the unutterably dear and 
brave Christophers of the world have 
been offered up in vain. These last 
have in very truth, like their proto- 
type, been the Christ-bearers to the 
world ; and as that Christopher of old 
carried the mysterious Child through 



38 THE GREAT EXPECTANCY 

the raging torrent, so they, breasting 
a darker and more dreadful flood, 
have brought his shining spirit back 
into the world and presented it to hu- 
manity at this most solemn Time. 
Shall we fail, then, to accept their 
poignant gift with anything short of 
the complete surrender of soul and 
body? 

What does the future hold*? 
Agony, death and war, no doubt, but 
also our own souls^ God, and the 
Great Expectancy. 



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